Events

March 29, 2024 9:30-11:30am

The Population Studies Center at Penn and the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research at NYU Shanghai present:

Environmental Contexts of Childhood in China

Welcome: Jere Behrman and Emily Hannum, Penn, Fan Wang, Houston, and Xiaogang Wu, NYU and NYU Shanghai.

• Rising Temperatures, Rising Risks: A Three-Decade Analysis of Children’s Heat Exposure in China (1990-2020), presented by Kai Feng, Penn.
• Breathing Inequality: Assessing Ambient Air Pollution Exposure Differences among Sociodemographic Groups, with Application to South China, presented by Sukie Yang, Penn.
• Early Childhood Life-Course Heat Exposures in an Urban Setting: Preliminary Insights from the SEEDS Project, presented by Jia Miao, NYU Shanghai.

Time: Continental breakfast available at 9:30; Panel and discussion 10:00-11:30.
Location: PSC Commons, Population Studies Center, 4th floor McNeil Building; register here for remote access (this event will not use the standard E&I Zoom link).

Project support from the National Science Foundation (1756738) and event support from the Penn Environmental Innovations Initiative (CECI Seminars) are gratefully acknowledged.  This panel is part of the Penn-NYU Shanghai Workshop on Inequalities and Child Development seminar series.

April 5, 2024 10:00am-5:00pm

Education and Inequality Workshop Spring Mini-Conference

PSC Library, 4th floor (403) McNeil Building

Program:

10:00 am – 11:30 am: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATION, ENVIRONMENT, AND SUSTAINABILITY

CHAIR: REHANA ODENDAAL

• Aaron Benavot, University at Albany, SUNY, Painting education systems green: The inclusion of environment, sustainability and climate content in the curriculum of primary and secondary education
• Nazar Khalid, Jere Behrman, Emily Hannum, and Amrit Thapa, Penn: Floods and children’s learning outcomes in rural India: Do resilient communities offer protection?
• Sukie Yang, Penn: Global Norms, National Priorities, Local Realities: Exploring Multilevel Influences on Climate Education Policy and Practice

11:30 am – 11:45 am: Break

11:45 am – 1:15 pm: HIGHER EDUCATION AND BEYOND

CHAIR: JOYCE KIM

• Joan Maya Mazelis, Rutgers University-Camden: “I just feel like you can’t be grown up living with your parents”: Student debt and family support in the transition to adulthood
• Niiaja Wright, Penn; Rory Kramer, Villanova; and Camille Charles, Penn: “The White women were standoffish”: Racialized cultural capital of nonWhite students in elite spaces
• Grace Yajun Zheng, Hong Kong University: Conceptualizing and measuring cultural struggles for college students experiencing upward mobility

1:15 pm – 2:30 pm: Lunch will be served

2:30 pm – 4:00 pm: STRATIFICATION IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

CHAIR: ELLEN BRYER

• Matthew McKeever, Haverford College: Stability and change in educational attainment in post-Apartheid South Africa
• Daniel Laurison, Swarthmore College: Class ceilings and class floors in the US
• Andrew Taeho Kim and Hyunjoon Park, Penn: Intergenerational educational mobility and life-course income trajectories in Korea 

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm: Light refreshments 

May 10, 2024 10:00am

Building Resilient Education Systems: Evidence from Large-Scale Randomized Trials in Five Countries

Co-sponsored by the Penn Education and Inequality Workshop, the Climate, Environment, and Childhood Inequalities (CECI) Project, and the GSE International Educational Development Program 

Education systems need to withstand frequent shocks, including conflict, disease, natural disasters, and climate events, all of which routinely close schools. During these emergencies, alternative models are needed to deliver education. However, rigorous evaluation of effective educational approaches in these settings is challenging and rare, especially across multiple countries. We present results from large-scale randomized trials evaluating the provision of education in emergency settings across five countries: India, Kenya, Nepal, Philippines, and Uganda. We test multiple scalable models of remote instruction for primary school children during COVID-19, which disrupted education for over 1 billion schoolchildren worldwide. Despite heterogeneous contexts, results show that the effectiveness of phone call tutorials can scale across contexts. We find consistently large and robust effect sizes on learning, with average effects of 0.30-0.35 standard deviations. These effects are highly cost-effective, delivering up to four years of high-quality instruction per $100 spent, ranking in the top percentile of education programs and policies. In a subset of trials, we randomized whether the intervention was provided by NGO instructors or government teachers. Results show similar effects, indicating scalability within government systems. These results reveal it is possible to strengthen the resilience of education systems, enabling education provision amidst disruptions, and to deliver cost-effective learning gains across contexts and with governments.

Location: GSE Room 259, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104.  (Please note non-standard location and that this will be an in-person event without a remote/hybrid option.)

Paper link: Building Resilient Education Systems: Evidence from Large-Scale Randomized Trials in Five Countries

Speaker biography: Noam Angrist